Bearded Atheist

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

A few years ago a married religious
comic grabbed my genitals without invitation or permission at the
comedy club. I went up later that evening and told everyone on stage,
in the harsh accusatory way tinted with self depreciating sarcasm all
the comics of my generation think is so clever. I wasn't as
articulate as I could have been about it, but I do remember that
nobody cared. I haven't brought it up again, until now.

It is
easy for others to forget I am a sexual assault victim. I don't talk
about it much, but it did help form many of my attitudes and
feelings now seventeen years later. I am as vocal as I can be about
the things I feel are important as often as I have the energy to do
so. I also seem to have near infinite capacity for conflict during
certain moods and take advantage of them to throw myself at the big
issues whenever I can. All of this has made the explosion of the
#meetoo movement interesting to watch. I haven't posted this yet
since I believe my role in this has mostly been to stay as supportive
as possible to the women in my life while lambasting the shitbags in
the comment sections who feel the need to become a problem.

Then
a few weeks ago I closed out a show at the comedy club downtown,
where I essentially did a fifteen minute intersectionalist rant with
incorporated recent social events. When I mentioned two local sexual
predators by name, I got the reaction in the club you'd expect,
including noises of recognition from the other experienced comic in
the room.

And this is where I get frustrated. Several years
ago I worked with a man named Jade Jesser. Jade was a bartender and a
brewpub I worked at, did a lot of coke, and spent a lot of time
trying to have sex with the other employees and the more attractive
customers. There are a thousand dudes exactly like him in every city,
most of them with the same workout routines and haircuts, and just
charming and attractive enough to get away with it. The biggest
difference is Jade was also doing comedy in the valley, and we worked
together. I didn't notice his worse habits right away and we became
workplace friends, I even gave him an old Conan comic book I found.

Then he finally talked me into joining him for a drink. As we
sat the bar he talked about how close he was to some gay people in
his life, how open-minded it had made him, and how offended he was I
wasn't more open to him about it since we were friends. Despite the
ridiculousness of expecting any person you're not in a relationship
with to be open with you about their sexuality, I tend to enjoy
talking about myself and we had a few conversations. A lot of
straight dudes over the years have been curious about what it means
to also be attracted to men and I typically don't mind sharing my
experiences. The rest of the night passed without memory, other than
his comments on the bodies of the women around us, which were
frequent and annoying.

Unfortunately, we were out with a few
coworkers together not long after, where the conversation turned to
women and the pursuit of them (men are boring). During which he
conspiratorially leaned in and accused me of lying about my sexuality
in order to trick women into sleeping with me. As if we were sharing
our cons and how effective they were. I was stunned and played it off
as a joke, not trusting the drinks in my heads to have heard him
correctly.

Our close work proximity kept me civil
and I started paying more attention, eventually noticing his toxic
patterns and communicating those things to many of the new women who
started working with us. Eventually this got back to him and he
challenged me on it, changing our relationship. I worked for a small,
slowly failing company. Jade was head bartender and old friends/coke
buddy with the manager. I could probably have done more, but I didn't
feel at the time like I had many options that would work out for me.
I frequently get labeled as a problem for talking about problems
caused by other people and I've learned I can only do so much.

Fast
forward a few months and Jade and I are both booked to do a local
Chive fundraiser. The booker was our store manager and decided having
Jade close out the show was a better choice, which is fine by me,
your show can suck if you want it to and I wasn't getting paid
anyway. My set went decently well (humblebrag: a local media person
originally from out of state came up afterwards and heaped drunken
praise on me, which made me feel pretty good), then Jade went up
next. He almost immediately went into several bi-phobic jokes about
me, attacking both me and my sexuality in general. I left during most
of his set.

At least one of them made a meme about me, so it wasn't a total loss

This resulted in me breaking off my relationship
with the Chive group immediately, benefit shows or no, and outing the
entire thing onto Facebook. I am nothing if not a petty bitch. In the
comments of that post, buried somewhere in Facebook memories, several
woman came out directly relating their own bad experiences with Jade.
The manager, currently the store manager of Even Stevens in downtown
Boise, handled this by responding to every story and allegation with
a all caps “FUCK YOU!”. There are times when I realize why that
brewpub closed so quickly. He later defended those comments by saying
Facebook isn't the “real world”.

And I guess this is why
I'm writing this. Despite the fact all of this was public, despite us
publicly telling stories about how Jade would have sex with his
employees and then abuse them at work to try to get then to quit,
many of the people in my life stayed friends with him, including
people I thought were close to me.

I am struggling to find the right way
to feel about this, like when after a longtime partner cheated on me
and all of our friends decided the middle ground was to stay friends
with both of us. The people who are most likely to support my actions
in these arenas are the people who barely know me, women comics from
other states who might not even recognize me in person, or random
Facebook friends/fans who I definitely would not recognize in person.

I can't say I have been without success. After our first ever
Boise's Funniest Person event, I took my observations about how some
of the men coaches were taking advantage of some of the women contestants to
the producer and the rule was changed the next season so coaches and
their contestants couldn't be alone anymore. I still believe that
only worked because the producer was a woman.

Yesterday I saw
a post on social media where that married religious comic who always
preaches clean only comedy and also grabbed my dick that one time was
preaching against porn. Her and I are friends, life is comedy, and I
am not mad at her. I don't honestly know all of her story and maybe
being sexually aggressive was a survival tactic for a woman in comedy
or just a way she allowed herself to be when she was without the
confines of her Mormon lifestyle. And maybe porn is toxic, maybe
that's why everyone is single these days, but I do know that her
actions did not hurt me and I do not need an apology or anything from
her. Maybe an apology all the comics who thought it was funny when I
mentioned being groped on stage all those years ago, maybe from all
those people who stayed friends with Jade after his bi-phobia and
sexually predatory behavior became public, definitely from the
manager who thought it was okay to attack women for allegations
against his friend.

Tuesday, August 29, 2017

*I originally wrote this for a now defunct left leaning satirical website in 2014. I am re-posting it here after Donald Trump decided to start arming police departments with military hardware again.*

Boise – After months of waiting, the Boise Police dept. is finally at the top of the waiting list for this year’s distribution of military surplus to city and state law enforcement agencies. In past years, Boise has received over 150 fully automatic weapons, two armored vehicles, sixteen jetpacks, and a flame thrower, not to mention numerous landmines and assorted buckets of ammo. In 2009, Boise also received a M1A2 Abrams tank, but an inexperienced rookie left the keys in it and it was last seen being used in a gang fight in southern Caldwell.

“Our department used to be armed with only our wits, training, and the practical tools necessary to protect citizens and keep our community safe.” wrote Lieutenant Dancer in a recent media release packet. The Lt. has been the liaison between the government and BPD leadership since 2002 when a shocking amount of military grade equipment started being manufactured across the country in response to imminent aggression from Iraq. “But now, with access to more efficient resources and equipment, every man, woman, and white baby living in the city of Boise has nothing to fear.” Lt. Dancer has never been seen in public and is most likely a Halliburton robot suppressing human behavior in service to an alien, cybernetic hivemind.

This week, Lt. Dancer is expecting a shipment of MK153 shoulder-launched multipurpose assault weapons, more commonly known as ‘rocket launchers’. “These tools are designed for target suppression,” explained the Lt. “and for unpaid parking tickets or any cyclist within six feet of a roadway, on or off their bicycle.” The Lt. continues on at length, explaining in detail the list of criminal offenses most likely to warrant the use of extreme explosive justice. “Burglary, petty larceny, jaywalking, speeding, rooting for the Vandals, saying ‘Happy Holidays’ instead of ‘Merry Christmas’, leaving less than a 10% tip, comparing any other politician to Hitler, moving here from California, balding, or listening to Sean Hannity.” If the program continues to be successful, crime rates in Boise will have fallen every year since the program’s implementation in August of 2001.

Boise has also been given the opportunity to be a future location for a family friendly, reeducation camp, edging out other Northwestern cities like Seattle and Portland by being more ‘compliant’. “It is our hope that the beacon of safety and peace that Boise, Idaho has become, will one day be used an example of adequate behavior for your kind all across this insignificant speck you call a planet.” Lt. Dancer’s release finishes. “It is the will of Ann Coulter that the cleansing begins soon, and the Reavers shall be fed on the screams of anyone with overdraft charges.”

And, while alien robots infiltrating all levels of our government is clearly the fault of President Obama, he refused to surrender hope in the face of the eminent doom of our species, reminding a crowd of 250 at a fundraiser last week of the time during Nixon’s administration when a portal to Hell was opened and thousands of our best and brightest students were sacrificed in order to bring Beelzebub into our plane of existence, only for humanity to be saved at the last minute by a plot device. The President then called upon Michael Bay, Jenny MacCarthy, Sarah Palin, and other American geniuses to step up to the plate and offer some solutions to us in this dark time. So far, only scientists have responded, but the American public never listens to them.

Thursday, August 17, 2017

Hi, and welcome back to the Bearded Atheist blog. It's been four years or so and this made me mad enough to start the entire thing up again. It's good to see you.

This is an evolving story and I will edit this to reflect any changing information or knowledge. This happened to myself earlier today at work; my place of employment is left vague intentionally to keep my Corporate Overlords from getting awks about it. I have witnesses to these events, but would prefer to keep their identities secret for the same reason.

To set the scenario up, it is important to know I carry myself with a much more queer bearing than I used to when I was younger. I was wearing pink earrings, blue nail polish, and I'm lucky enough to work at a place that allows me to wear a button that showcases my sexuality.

This one, because I also like DIIIICKS.

As the years have marched on, I have become something more of an activist, identifying with Intersectionalists and actively supporting BLM and Antifa (if you aren't antifascist, you are the most wrong). My atheist activism is folded into all of that. I still run my atheist show twice a year (two weeks from today, actually) but, considering the recent political climate, there is so much to focus on and it can be hard to keep up with everything. All that being said, I am much more aggressive about things and have become nearly immune to negative feedback. Also, my extreme, nearly militant opinions about everything have kept a lot of the worse people away from me. It is not out of character for me to out a man publicly for sending unsolicited dick pictures, or to question the Minister talking about the "gay lifestyle" exactly what the fuck that means to her face. I am not an awkward person about this and, if anything, leverage other people's awkward tendencies to my advantage. I am not always nice about it, but today's events bothered me because it was so wrong.

I currently work as a cashier at a popular grocery outlet near a busy intersection. During lunchtime it is not out of place for me to wait on a wide variety of customers, from actual farmers, WoC in hijabs, skateboarding teenagers, and soccer moms, all the way to Mormon missionaries, travelling businessmen, members of the state government, on duty police officers and the military. I have a dry sense of humor with strangers, but am mostly open and friendly to everyone. As always, I am passionately curious about people and what motivates them, frequently engaging in micro-conversations with the random aspects of humanity I meet. Within this mess an older, white male in full military camo, with an Army Ranger patch on his arm and a Lt. Col. insignia on the front of his uniform came into my line in express. His name was Peterson.

Lt. Colonel or Tree Star, I can never tell

Peterson and I talked about him going camping this weekend and then him heading further south to catch the upcoming Solar eclipse moving through our state in a few days. It was friendly and cordial, but then, right as he was about to leave, he reached into his back pocket and gave me this:

This, my friends is a Chick Tract. For those of you who aren't aware of these wonderful little booklets, they are handed out by a lot of Christians in an attempt to scare people into/back into their religion. They are full on garbage, and this one is horrible for a lot of reasons. If you've got 45 minutes. listen to my friends Hugo and Jake over at The Bible Reloaded do an entire episode on this one right HERE.

I have several problems with this. First off, an officer in uniform threatening civilians with violence by sending them to hell is highly unethical. These things are hate speech. Filled with lies and hypocrisy from the early 90's, this issue not only makes up what the bible says and what was happening within the LGBT community at the time, it insinuates that all gay men are also pedophiles through illustration, and it uses the story of Lot to make judgment on us. INCLUDING THE PART WHERE LOT GIVES UP HIS DAUGHTERS TO BE RAPED. That is not a typo or misrepresentation at all; in this story, the "godly" man offers his virginal daughters up to be raped and yet he is somehow considered a good person. According to this tract, Rape > being Queer.

So, to my full understanding. Lt. Col. Peterson finds it be completely acceptable to hand out religious paraphernalia threatening violence to people while in uniform, and does so from the cowardly position of them being forced to be nice to him since they are at work and doubly cowardly because he did it at the end of the conversation. Like a cowardly coward. Let me repeat that, Lt. Col. Peterson is a coward.

Now, I'm personally pro-soldier because they get me drunk a lot when I'm on the road doing comedy and many of my friends and family have served, also they do not create the horrible policies I am actually against. I also know it is most likely against the rules and this behavior does not represent the Army Rangers or the service they have done for this country. But our taxes pay this man and he is representing our country in a leadership position and we should expect more from him, and I'm certain most of you can at least agree we don't want our military officers using their uniform to push whatever religion they happen to be into. This is unacceptable and I am not going to drop it.

Feel free to leave comments or questions here and I will get back to you as soon as I can. I will be talking about this on a podcast in less than two hours and will post a link to that with our opinions as soon as it's posted. Thanks for reading.

Saturday, August 31, 2013

Unless you are an incredibly attractive and lucky person, or a complete shut-in, you've probably dealt with the dreaded Friend Zone at some time or another. In our attempts to couple up with someone that we desire, they place us in a different category and we enter into a world of pain. It's a treacherous place full of feelings and more bullshit than a political caucus, yet nobody ever treats it as the serious problem that it really is, until now. You're welcome.

The four people reading this that understand me know that I fall in love every week. It's a curse of my artistic temperament, some psychological crap, and a combination of curiosity and near desperation. I have always been like this. As a child I once accidentally saw another seven year old flash me her naked chest and I spent every day after that doing my best to be next to her during snacks or during nap time. I still remember my first crush's name, Sara, and her early 80's haircut sitting in front of me in elementary school. I spent more time fantasizing about the softness of her neck than listening to the teacher, and I am completely positive that she never once knew my name. When I got to the age where the boys and girls chase each other, literally, around the school playgrounds, one of them let me catch her, most likely out of curiosity, and I spent an awkward four minutes desperately trying to find something to say that would convince her to let me catch her again (I have never been fast). She never did. And neither did anybody else until I was nineteen years old.

For some reason, women don't find whining about it attractive however.

Fast forward to now. I'm 36, twice divorced, openly bisexual, and almost all of my non-comedian friends are women. Most of my relationships are short, sexual based affairs, casual to keep my mind and heart intact, broken up only by intense, whirlwind relationships that carry me two to three years into the future, always depositing me in the same Elephant's graveyard where familiar pieces of myself are still strewn about. But on the way to and fro through this pattern, I am still frequently struck with the occasional passion for a dark haired muse with a bold profile or a fresh faced, talented personality with more charm than sense. I am easily distracted from the ennui that constantly burrows into me, and beauty or the promise of attention are my two favorite aphrodisiacs. And since my parents let 80's culture and the Bible form most of my opinions about relationships, everything I was working with was based on He-man cartoons, virgin births, and Pete Cetera lyrics.

No seriously, I used to sing that song out loud while I cried myself to sleep at nights. And now it's stuck in your head forever as well. Suckers.

Now that I'm an adult, sort of, things are more complex and a LOT more comfortable. Most of my female friends are married, many of them with kids, and I have evolved into the supportive, almost-gay friend who actually enjoys listening to their problems and experiencing their company for the benefits that it provides without wanting anything in return. But it was a journey to mature to this point and I did it without a map, something even Bilbo took with him, and he forgot his pipe.

First off, let's be completely clear: I hate the term 'Friend Zone'. I find it to be a gross over-simplification of all the nuances that go into interpersonal relationships. I've always hated it. Labels irritate me in general, but this one more than most. Also, if you aren't trying to be some one's friend as well as their partner, get out of the gene pool right now, because everybody deserves a partner who is doing their damnedest to be the best friend to that person that they can be. Life is brutal for almost all of us, and you are going to need some one's heart and brain to be on your team more than their junk. When times get tough, and they will, it's friendship more than anything that can carry you through to the other side.

Secondly, most of what people call the friend-zone is just them not understanding the language that the other person is using to communicate while simultaneously being too selfish or ignorant to understand that other people are mostly obsessed with their own concerns and desires in which they don't have to take a priority.

Hey look, you aren't the center of their universe and you don't have to be!

I know that's hard to swallow, but it's the same for everyone and none of us are special. Even the person you want has been there, might still be there. And do you really want them to settle for you when you deserve so much more? Good relationships can be a lot of work, but they are much easier when both of you secretly thinks that they won by finding that other person. So the first thing you need to do is get a good understanding what's actually happening on the ground instead of in your head. Also, miscommunication will happen, and doors open and close all the time. Life isn't even remotely fair and it doesn't always have to make sense. And sometimes getting what you want doesn't always work out. I once dated my best friend and I got there by being a nice guy...

It only happened to me once that way guys, but it can happen.

True story: I met a girl back when I was promoting myself on Myspace. I was sending out hundreds of cold friend requests in an attempt to be the first comic in Idaho to get to 1000 friends for the bragging rights. I know, my life is that exciting. Also, nobody else knew we were competing, so I won easily. She sent me back an email asking me what my deal was, I was honest with her, and it lead to a conversation. Now, I wasn't trying to get laid or meet people, I was playing a game with myself, so I was very casual and friendly. Turns out she had just moved here to Boise and needed friends, so we started hanging out. We ended up having some chemistry (I'll get back to this part later), which led to us almost kissing in the park one day. The next day she told me that she was still involved with a guy out of state and she wasn't ready to move on yet, so I did the right thing and respected her opinion. It didn't remove my attraction to her and it didn't stop me from wanting to be with her, but I chose to look at it from the perspective that I was lucky just to be her friend, and I had long since gotten used to the pain of being unwanted, so I let things live there for a while.

Now I want to stop the story right here to point something out. By the definition of the term, I was friend-zoned pretty hard right there. But I always take the responsibility for my own decisions, and since it was my decision to continue the friendship, any pain I felt after that conversation was my own fault and not hers, which is the biggest difference between approaching this like an adult and acting like a selfish child. You can end friendships whenever you want to. If somebody wants something different from you than you want to give them, be it friendship or a relationship, or whatever, and you decide to continue onward as things are, you have to learn that it's your own decision making that's keeping you there. Life is too short to torture ourselves.

We continued to grow closer as friends. We had similar interests and I started dragging her to all the open mics where she made friends with most of the comics in the group and started hanging out with the lot of us. Then something happened. My gallbladder started producing copious amounts of bile whenever I ate something and I started going to the emergency room once a week to get my body pumped full of morphine. The first time I drug myself to the ER alone, because I am a stupid, typical man, and when I told my friend about this, she yelled at me. She was right, it was silly of me to endanger myself when a good friend lived so close to me, so I let her take me every time thereafter. This brought made us even closer friends. As I was laying there squirming in pain while nurses tried to hold me down long enough to check my vitals, hers was the only face looking on me with genuine care. Later, after my surgery, I wasn't allowed to work at the prison for a few months so I started to fall behind in my bills. Her mother moved out of state, leaving her needing a roommate, and me needing a roommate, so we became roomies.

This is where I hit friend-zone level 99. We both loved to talk, all day, erryday. We would hang out together all day, then literally chat in bed together until we passed out. I started sleeping in her room. Now, I knew the score, and was content with the way things were. I hadn't stopped noticing other people, but most of my time was consumed by being with my best friend, and we were having a blast. I had some pretty strong feelings for her, but they were firmly rooted in the reality that she was still in love with a man that she couldn't have and so everybody was in the same boat. Life is fun like that.

Then, one day, we came home drunk together after a great night at the comedy club. I helped carry her up the stairs to our apartment where she demanded that I give her a bath. Now, despite our close living arrangements, I had always been very respectful of her privacy and had never seen her naked, even accidentally, but she stubbornly refused to come to bed until I did her bidding, so I embraced my masochism and got to work. Now, if you've never tried to bathe a drunk adult, I highly recommend that you never do it, because it is horrible. It wasn't sexual at all. I immediately got irritated with her and eventually got frustrated with her attempts at trying to drown herself. She wouldn't even let me dress her, demanding to be left in the tub all night. The best I could do for her was to drain out all the water that she'd let me (almost all of it), and I eventually passed out watching over her like a drunk guardian angel.

Three hours later she woke up and decided to have sex with me.

Yes, we were both still a little drunk, but the amount of investment and honest friendship we had poured into our time together took us to a level of intimacy that I have still never found with anyone else. The tension that had become background noise for me, like living next to an airport does to the sound, had been working out while I wasn't paying enough attention and I was not prepared for how powerful it had become.

After we were done she felt guilty and left me there to go into the living room to call her boyfriend. Eventually we started dating, later we cheated on each other, and now, an eternity later, I see pictures of her and her lovely family. Sometimes getting what you want is a curse because why you don't have it in the first place exists for good reasons. Her and I are still friends, although we are both too busy to talk much, and seeing her smiling face run through my timeline on social media only ever brings me happiness and good memories, but that's not why we're here. See, it turns out she was right in the very beginning. Her instincts to end our burgeoning relationship were spot on and, while that isn't always the case, if I had known that I was going to break up with her a half-dozen times in the space of less than two years, I probably would have skipped it myself.

Sometimes it even happens to aliens.

So now, when I meet someone and I am attracted to them, I do things to communicate that interest while simultaneously doing my best to listen to what they are trying to tell me. I embrace the power of solitude, I spend a good amount of time focusing on myself, and I fill up my time with hobbies and interests, some of which make me a more complex and interesting person as a side effect. I exercise, I try to become a better person, I find my limitations and try to move the line. Occasionally, I find someone in my life compelling enough to lift me outside of my comfort zone, but like most people with a tendency towards cynicism, I take my sweet ass time about it. At times people are interested in me, it's happening right now, and I do my best to communicate where I'm at to them, because I've been them before and we're all only human. I do my best to try and understand that it's not all about me, and I have discovered the fact that life is far more rewarding when you treat your relationships with other people in the least selfish way possible. I do my best to be a good friend and a nice guy, because while a lot of dudes out there will tell you to pretend to be an asshole to trick a girl into liking you, they have exactly zero chance of building a healthy and adult relationship with someone that is going to have any longevity by following that strategy.

So here I am, currently listening to opera, having spent all day in the Halloween pajamas that I have been wearing all Summer, slowly sipping on vodka and juice, about to wrap up another blog post before I spend another two hours playing Lord of the Rings Online, and I am being completely open and honest about all of that because, while who I am is not for everybody, for the right person, I am becoming exactly who I need to be. And that's how you survive the Friend-Zone. You outgrow it.

Silly Elf, if I were as pretty as you, I wouldn't listen very well either*.

So if your long term struggle is that nobody wants you, make yourself a better person. Not for them, but for you. Enjoy yourself, find things, friends, and passions that set you on fire and knock down the walls of your perceptions and limitations. Eventually a side effect of this life long journey will be that somebody else heading the same way will find themselves desiring your companionship and you guys can go slay some metaphorical Balrogs together.

Man, I really need to stop playing so many video games. Just kidding, GAMER FOR LIFE, YO!

On a final note, an intelligent woman on my friends list posted this while I was writing this blog post and, since it's relevant, I'd thought I share it with you...

Tuesday, July 9, 2013

A few weeks ago, a good friend asked me why I don't have any children yet. Here is his answer.

And it starts with me being homeless.

Hobo beard, Oct 2011. Hi Olek!

I first became homeless two weeks after my 18th birthday. It was early Summer in 1995 and I had been out playing basketball with one of my church friends when I came home to find all of my belongings stuffed into large garbage bags and thrown out on the front lawn. My parents had gone through the trouble of collecting some phone numbers and had called around so all of my other friends had beat me to the scene, my future brother in law had even defiantly parked his pick-up truck on the front lawn. It was a strange moment being a half dozen teenagers trying to make the mature decision of what to do with the virgin ginger who sang on the church choir. Fifteen minutes into our deliberations, my parents continued to hide in the darkened house and sent out my baby brother and mentally challenged little sister to tell us that if we didn't take my stuff off of their lawn soon, they would be forced to call the cops. So I left.

I spent a few months hopping from bedroom floor to bedroom floor, all of my friends were from church and I had earned a reputation with all of their parents by always being polite and for cleaning up after myself when I came over for supper, so it wasn't a hard sell. It wasn't that bad, actually. My life was mostly awkward moments and a complete lack of privacy, but I had a roof over my head and food to eat. However, to this day I sometimes still sleep on the floor just to keep in practice, like I might need to get used to it again someday.

So much of my life has been running away from that moment, chased by the most common phrase I remember hearing from my mother; not an "I love you", but a resentment flavored "The day you grow taller than me, I'm going to chop your legs off", repeated weekly from the time I was six until I grew too strong for her to bully me anymore. And like a lot of survivors of domestic abuse, every intimate relationship I have tried to forge since then has been covered in her hand prints and I have always struggled to wash them off.

She was rarely physical with me, she didn't escalate into that direction until she started abusing my younger brothers and sisters. Not often, but she would sometimes trade slaps with my sister for up to thirty minutes at a time and she wasn't above using her weight to try to crush one of us if we wouldn't obey. Her cruelness was casual and beastly, usually a lash out for some perceived slight to her fragile ego or limited intellect. My father was frequently stressed and angry, joining in the continual shouting, but he is a genuinely nice guy who only recently started to realize the damage my mother did to all of her children, so I try not to hold onto that. He did apologize for my childhood last month, so that's something. He's trying, and that's all anybody could ask for.

Or you could ask for a cat, some drugs, and a balloon necklace, whatever really.

I once estimated that I had fought with my mother an average of once per day from the age of five until I was 18. That's almost 5000 arguments, blows, thrown objects, broken doors, missing hugs, and one six foot bookcase that I pulled off of the wall in front of my mother so she would stop following me around the house screaming in my face when I was 17. I knew this wasn't normal, I became the perfect guest at the houses of my friends so that I could praise from at least somebody's mother, but I didn't realize what was being done to me.

Even I didn't figure this out until just recently.

My sister and I got married at about the same time. She had been dating one of the guys, the one we nicknamed 'Biff', and had been kicked out of the house at 17 because they told us that my sister had become infected with her boyfriend's "evil spirit". I let her stay at my apartment for a while, the one I was finally able to afford after getting hired on at McDonalds (my parents wouldn't let me work when I was at home, so I had no money), but eventually her and Biff got together and she had a couple of girls. Neither marriage survived. My sister dedicated her life to her children, finally marrying a good man who treats everyone better than they treat him, and having three more boys, the last one is only five weeks old. I met him on the Fourth of July at a friend's BBQ where my sister had taken her kids. And they are beautiful. All of them, really. My oldest niece is an introvert who was hiding in the car reading a book, my youngest niece, finally a teenager, loudly announcing to the room how I am her favorite uncle made my heart happy in a way that is unreachable except by the words of children.

And I have always loved the girls, probably more than they know, but I missed something with them growing up. When 13 first learned to walk she would hug everybody. And I mean everybody, we were positive she would get kidnapped, if you can call it that when it looks like she's volunteering. It was harrowing for her 21 year old mother. 13 stayed equally as friendly as she got older, which I always took as good news. I hope that no matter what happens to her in life, that the warm core of her heart that constantly reaches out to people always has a chance to flourish, it is a beautiful gift. Granted, it's easy to get along with kids when you're an uncle, but the oldest nephew, who looks like me a bit, has been trying to help his mother with the chores since he could stand. He used to throw clean clothes back into the washing machine because he thought it was helping. HOW ADORABLE IS THAT YOU GUYS?

Almost this adorable.

Even then I missed it. Until the BBQ, when I was sitting with my curly headed, two year old nephew for the first time. We were watching He-Man on VHS and I casually observed what a chill little dude he was. He was leaning into the corner of the couch, hands draped comfortably across his lap, when he nodded and gave me a smug look. And that's when the last piece of the puzzle I didn't even know I was trying to solve fell into place. Because I sure as hell didn't invent the smug look, but I perfected it on my branch of the family. And the one thing everyone is so surprised about when they get to know me is fact that I'm surprisingly kind and nice to the people I care about. Somewhere, at the core of me, is the same heart (almost) that beats in my niece, that beats in my nephews, that beats in so many of us, and why I had assumed otherwise is just another reminder of how much there is to learn. My sister and her husband have worked hard to be good parents to all of them, but I know these kids. They are good people.

And, I guess, so am I.

At my heart I am an incredibly nice guy. Almost disgustingly nice. I used to think it was a weakness, a desperate attempt to gain attention, but this last year has been full of self-reflection and self-improvement and I am going to be entirely honest about myself here when I say that that's the kind of person I genuinely want to be. Nice.

And a crazy pirate. I would love that job.

Gone are my years of accepting any attention I could get from someone, no matter what the cost to me, and I have finally managed to rebuild enough of myself that there haven't been any new burn marks in years, but in looking forward to the rest of my life all I see still are hard choices. I know things will get better because I am making that happen with a tremendous amount of work, but when the life of the Normies calls out to me, like it did at the BBQ, an old tendril of mood strikes out at me and drags me below for a bit to be with her.

"I have never loved you." The giant says, with cold blue eyes and clammy, pale skin. "No one will ever really love you." It doesn't matter that she never says these words, that she is incapable of being this precise with her hatred, but with lifetimes trapped with her inside me, it can be hard to move. My arms are too short to make her love me, if only I could hold her one more time maybe she could love me.

But now I know how my mind works and I can navigate out of that. I have been forcing a lot of change upon myself lately, all for the better, with the intent to manifest a different destiny than the one I was working towards. Things are going well, I've lost a considerable amount of weight and have recently gone through a growth spurt on stage that made it so I could quadruple the amount of time I had for standup. I'm happy most of the time and that's as good as things can be. I am positive.

Yet inside are wastelands of pollution, and minefields hidden in every direction that brings me close to people. Domestic abuse tries to multiply by changing you into the kind of monster that puts it into others. And I am not blameless of this, I have enjoyed hurting many people in my life, and I am sure none of them truthfully deserved it. I have always been terrified of seeing my mother in the mirror, so I have avoided it. So when you ask me why I don't have any children, when you follow it up with the compliment that I have so much to give someone as a parent, it breaks my heart because I do. I know I do, but there is a wide chasm between me and the type of person I need to become to trust myself, and I don't know if I will ever be able to build a bridge large enough to cross it. I want desperately for someplace to feel like home, but it never has, and I'm sometimes afraid that it never will. I try so hard to build things only to watch them burn to the ground time and time again, always leaving me homeless and alone in the cold.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

One crisp summer morning, I was driving a patrol truck in
circles around a prison when the clock hit 5 a.m., I pulled over to the side of
the road, and I put a loaded .38 right next to my eye.

It was quiet.

This quiet.

Nothing but the ambient desert, and the psychic weeping of
1200 men locked in a government cage. Then I started to count.

3.

Everything turned black and I could smell my mother’s hair.
Back before I was five and we became enemies, back from when everything could
still be okay. I heard once that we used to be a happy family, but I’m the
first born and I don’t remember it. My radio squawked and I looked up as the other patrol truck
drove passed me, but I was invisible and he saw nothing.

2.

Everything went black again and I remembered my cousin’s
funeral. At 21 I was less than a year from my first divorce, when he received a
phone call from his young wife. She and their new baby were at the airport. My
cousin said he would be right there, but instead he walked into the backyard
and put a hole right through his brain. At the funeral his mother dropped to her
knees and begged me to treat my own mother better.

But what does she know? I hate my mother.

I don’t even know the baby’s name, but my cousin’s widow
married his best friend and they wrote a new story together. I never got to read the note he left us. I wonder if he
remembered me before he did it.

Probably not.

1.

I opened my eyes and noticed that the night was fleeing from
the sky. I blinked once, twice, then watched as everything turned to ash then faded
away. I was the last man on Earth. I could feel everything
retreating from me, all of the pressure and weight of reality slipping away. It
felt like I was falling asleep. Drowning myself to sleep. Even her voice was
finally gone. The only voice that I have ever loved. There was a pregnant emptiness, and all I
could hear was the sound of my own heart.

I looked at the gun.

Is this all that’s left of Fantasia? Is there where the
dreamer ends?

I closed my eyes for the last time and listened for my final
heartbeat.

Wait.

Go back.

They had started a new story.

And this is when being a procrastinator saved my life.

I was born in 1977 to a deaf woman and a man so nerdy that
he was already a computer programmer in the

70’s. By the time I was five my
mother already had two new babies and had completely forgotten about me. My
second earliest memory is being left alone in my grandparent’s back yard for
hours because my grandfather was sick and couldn’t handle having me inside.
This happened all summer when my grandmother was out globe-hopping with the
rest of Mensa and my mother was forced to come over to take care of my
grandfather. We never had sunblock, so I spent a lot of time wandering amongst
the roses avoiding as many blisters and bee stings as possible. Inside, their
house was always decorated with African touristy stuff, and I spent as much
time as I could touching everything I could get my hands on, until my grandfather would sing me old songs
from the 40’s, then kick me outside,

His voice was gravel and reeked of medication. My Grand
father. I remember his A&W diet root beer, the stale, wooden scent of his
pipe, and the fact that he was the only person who ever wrote me a letter.
Until he died of a heart attack when I was 11, a handwritten note would come in
the mail several times a year with my name on it. My grandfather, a 350 pound
WWII vet would tell me that he loved me and how much he missed me, and he
always ended by asking me to write him back.

My mother thinks I hate her for the summers of blisters and
bee stings, but the real pain lies in the fact that I never answered him.

I don’t know where it started, but I know that it never
ended. In the second grade I kicked over my school desk and threw all of my
books at the teacher. In the third grade I convinced my teacher that I had been
kidnapped when she asked me to step outside of the school gym and I decided to
walk home. That’s when the state of Washington decided I needed to see a
therapist. By the fifth grade, living back in Idaho because of my grandfather’s
death, I argued with my teacher about the correct way to use the N word, I was
wrong. At a parent-teacher conference later that year, she lied about me to my
parents. In the sixth grade I was forced to switch classrooms to Mr.
Budzianowski, who doubled as my basketball coach, where I was forced to run
laps whenever I acted up in class. He also nicknamed me the fastest hands in
the west, both for how quickly I would answer his questions, and sarcastically
for how badly I passed the basketball.

My parents started homeschooling all five of us after I
finished the sixth grade, and that’s when I really started getting angry. I
fought with my parents almost every day. I wasn’t the only one they couldn’t
manage, but I was the first. They did their best to control me, and I did my
best to make it difficult. They’d kick me out of the house then lie about it
when I came home with the cops. They wouldn’t allow me to get a job or learn
math, I used to punch holes in their walls, they would buy food that the older
kids weren’t allowed to eat, I would steal it when they weren’t looking. By the time I was eighteen, it was no surprise
to find all of my things in black garbage bags out on the lawn when I came home
from church one night. All of my other friends were from the same church and
seventeen, but we collaborated and I lived on the floor of their bedrooms until
I got a job at McDonalds. I got fired from McDonalds two years later, only
three days after my first wedding, for kicking a Mexican. Don’t worry, she had
it coming.

I met my second wife on 9/11. That 9/11. She was a cutter
and a stripper and the closest thing I’ve ever had to a soul-mate so you have
to know, we never could have been happy. By the time my second wife lost her mind,
I had been working at the prison for over three years and I didn’t know if I
was more fat, sick, or lonely. I had been angry for so long that the world
always seemed to be on fire.

And eventually that fire burned everything else away and left me standing alone
with only one way out, that .38

But they had started a new story.

I slowly opened my eyes, gently put the gun away and looked
at the clock, it was 5:01.

I spent the last 30 minutes of my sixteen hour shift like
every other; I traded places with the next officer, I walked through a lot of
gates, then I drove home to pass out.

I woke up in a new world.

It was just like the old world, almost. At first I thought
everything was the same. The people were the same tired people that I knew, and
the daily rituals echoed the ones before, but something was very different, I
just

couldn't smell it yet.

Time passed.

Two months later and I was already bored with Alcoholics
Anonymous. I had only wanted things to be different, I had only wanted to start
a new story, a story with a better ending, but this was worse than any hell. My
sponsor was an ex-meth dealer, a more lucky version of the same kind of guy I
was used to babysitting, he meant well but endless repeats of, “It’s all dope,
man.”, didn’t exactly fill me with confidence.

And I was filling with something.

Things in this new world were clear to me in a way that they
never had before. Everything made sense; the one thing that I would have wished
for was finally real.

I could see.

I could see that everyone was struggling, and that everyone
was doing the best that they could. I could see that most of the things that we
thought were important were just illusions created by us to fill the real void
we carry within. I could see that the only things that really matter are loving
when you can and always trying to do your best. I could see all of this and
that none of it would ever matter.

When you look into the abyss long enough, it stares back.
Then it goes out for pizza and forgets to invite you because the abyss is a
giant dick and once you realize how big everything everything EVERYTHING really
is, you start to realize how pointless everything is.

And that was it.

This new world was hilarious and not to be taken too
seriously. Depending on how you define ‘you’, sometimes you win and sometimes
you were never born. The universe is an infinite place and you’re not usually
in it.

I’m not going to stand here and tell you that I’m never
angry anymore, and I’m not going to try and sell you on the snake oil of
positive thinking, but every day when I wake up I have a choice of what kind of
world I want to live in, and today, I chose this one.

In this world, the unbridled laughter of children is the
perfect music, and all the colors of the rainbow are my favorite, and sometimes
when you fight against depression long enough, it gets better.

Sometimes, it gets better. Sometimes you can fight your way
through to the other side. Not everybody makes it, not everybody can, but
sometimes you just get lucky.

Friday, December 21, 2012

One of the best parts about being an atheist is how low-key it is. I get to go about my day to day business without a single atheist based thought, listening to my jams and working on some Family Guy/Resident evil fan fiction without a care in the world. Then I head to the store to buy some more pulp less OJ, because I am not a filthy animal, when I see something like this...

Wait, what?

...and my brain resets. Atheists have their billboards too, simple things like reminding people that it's okay not to believe, they might even go so far as to call religion out for having been harmful or unnecessary, but they never threaten open revolt. Those of you who have been reading my atheist stuff for a while should remember that I belong to the school of thought that believes that there is plenty of room in our culture for religion, just so long as that religion doesn't try to inappropriately try to influence the government or actively try to ruin people's lives (I'm a big fan of reminding everyone that the Catholic church still hasn't done enough to stop kid fucking in their system). I think that's a balanced and even tone for an atheist, even most of my posts on here are just a lame attempt to explain something about us atheists to people who might not understand. There's no hatred here, I honestly don't care what you believe as long as you're not being a dick about it.

So, where does all this hatred come from? Why do some believers hate us so much? Some atheists seem to believe that the basis of that hatred is fear, just like Yoda says, that the fact that there is a group of productive and happy people who openly defy the will of their god undermines the belief that you need faith to be happy and productive. I don't know about that, but the things said about atheists are sometimes so silly that it's hard to even answer them, never mind taking someone who says this stuff seriously.

Atheists, according to Fox News.

But who honestly believes that atheists are actively trying to murder your children? Turns out, plenty of people. Thomas Aquinas called unbelief the "greatest of sins", and the rhetoric has only gone up from there. Since time immemorial, atheists have been ostracized, tortured, and murdered simply for not believing. It's been done by a lot of religions with a lot of excuses, but it all comes down to the same thing, the believer's complete inability to empathize or understand why somebody would disagree with them. Here's an excellent example of how completely without reason their line of thinking is:

Seems legit.

Stare at that for a second. We have a bald and angry man, chosen for the emotional response one gets while staring into his over-ham exposed face, and an interesting attempt at logic to show why being an atheist is stupid. You see, every atheist obviously hates god because they don't believe in him. Wait, maybe they don't believe in him because they hate him. See, being an atheist is silly.

Atheism is the first world view. You are born completely without understanding or knowledge, reliant upon your parents and your culture to imprint on you a world view. Every child is exposed to the religion of their parents and then grows up believing what they were told as a child, and some people seem to act like if you disagree with their religion, you're calling their parents morons (which, considering the number of morons on this planet, might actually be true).

And don't even get me started on the 'War on Christmas'. Saying there's a war on Christmas when it's already an eight week long economy masturbator and stolen collection of pagan rituals is borderline idiocy.

Somebody already got me started

So, sometimes we get mad. Sometimes we fight back. And yet, when we do that, we play right into the hands of the pundits and they continue to paint us as terrorists and feminist promoters (I cannot underline enough how completely out of touch with reason some of these people are), they like to call us Nazis despite the fact that nobody takes the Nazi insult seriously and that Hitler was an open Catholic with support from the church.

Related

Sure, sometimes a teenager will sue her school because of a bible verse located in the gymnasium after she asks nicely and they ignore her. I can see why this would piss off people (I can't see why this would piss off people), but the response was pages of death threats and insults to her social media accounts. Once again, she did something completely legal and protected by her constitutional rights, then many god fearing Americans decided to insult, threaten, and vilify a harmless teenager. You know, God's work.

And that's why were here. That's why I give a shit. Because there aren't any atheist groups threatening the lives of teenagers for any reason. So does that make me an atheist soldier? I don't know. But do I have a handful of jokes I tell on stage and a blog where I try to help us all get along? Absolutely. And if that makes me evil, maybe being evil isn't so bad after all.